Once a week review the past week of your SWEET Life and tally your successes. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, & Tranquility. Do you feel better rested, relaxed, more energetic, healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!
This blog will contain topics of the week for you to review and consider.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Recipe: Easy Slow Cooker Pot Roast

Appraising Your SuccessThe end of the week is a good time to review the past week of your SWEET Life and count up your accomplishments. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each aspect of the SWEET Life: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, and Tranquility. If you didn’t achieve some of your goals for the week, then next week, focus on those areas more and think about how to fulfill them more consistently.How do you feel at the end of this week? Are you better rested? Do you feel relaxed? Are you more energetic? Do you feel generally healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!

Topic of the week #21 – Recipe: Pot Roast

My family loves all-in-one meals where the protein, grains/starches and vegetables (and possibly dairy) are combined into one dish. I received a slow cooker for Christmas, so I’ve been reading a lot of slow cooker recipes and trying some out. Unfortunately, a lot of them are what I call “high-involvement,” meaning I have to spend 30 minutes or longer preparing or cooking. I thought the point of a slow cooker is that you dump a bunch of stuff in, turn it on, and leave for 4-8 hours! I don’t want to spend more than 30 minutes chopping vegetables, browning meat, making sauces, etc. Tonight, I modified a couple of pot roast recipes to make an easy pot roast with potatoes and carrots. It was fork tender, my family loved it, and it was easy:

Trim fat off pot roast. (My husband was kind enough to coat the meat in flour and brown in on the stove. All the recipes called for it, but I was going to skip it.) Place pot roast in slow cooker. Pour beef broth over meat. Sprinkle onion soup mix over meat. Place potatoes and carrots on top of meat. Cook on high 4 hours or on low 8 hours.

A few comments on this meal: Soups tend to be very high in sodium, but you can buy low sodium beef broth and see if there is low sodium onion soup mix. Pot roast is not known for being one of the healthiest types or cuts of meat. I eat pot roast about once a year, so I guess I’m done for 2008. But it sure tastes good, and it’s a great comfort food on a cold, rainy day! If you want to feel ecologically better about eating pot roast, buy it from a local, organic farm.

I welcome your feedback on the Topic of the Week. You can share your comments at: http://sweetlifeweekly.blogspot.com/. I am also looking for more topics of the week. If there are any topics related to the SWEET Life that you would like me to explore, please let me know by replying to this email.